Well, the 89th Academy Awards were last night, and they were ACTUALLY CRAZY, YOU GUYS. This afternoon, Nina and Brian are here to break down the snubs, most emotional moments, Kimmel fails, and plot twists that might earn the telecast a Best Picture nod next year.Continue reading →

As we come closer to the Academy Awards, we’ll be posting short profiles of each Best Picture nominee, attempting, in our own ways, to not only sum up what the movie is about, but why we believe it scored one of the eight coveted nominations, and why it could possibly take home the big prize come Oscar night. Enjoy!

As Ben discussed in his first Best Picture Profile of the year, we usually try to find some kind of theme to unify the Best Picture nominees, and this year, we settled on “Journey to the Unknown,” since we feel that, in one way or another, each of these films features characters struggling to come to grips with a new reality, new information, or anything that lies beyond what they already know.

It should go without saying, then, why Room falls squarely into that category, perhaps more so than any other film this year, in that this movie focuses on two people trapped in the tiniest of spaces, one of whom only finds out that the unknown exists at all just before he’s thrown into it headfirst.

Man, do the Coens ever know how to direct, write, and shoot a goddamn movie. Inside Llewyn Davis is their most unrelentingly bleak effort in years. The movie is beautiful, tragic, and seemingly plotless (I’m having some deja-vu to my last review), but comes full circle in a staggering way. It’s the very definition of a “black comedy;” every time you laugh, you feel bad about it a minute later.

David O. Russell seems to be on a character study schedule – one year, it’s down and out brothers in The Fighter; the next, it’s a couple who find solace in the other’s crazy, in Silver Linings Playbook; and this year, it’s hustlers, housewives and corrupt government men in American Hustle. Russell is famously concerned with characters over plot. In fact, despite its apparently tightly written script, many moments in Hustle were improvised, which concerned one of its stars, Christian Bale – to which Russell responded that “[he] hates plots.” This piece of trivia alone will divide the movie’s viewers, and so far, it HAS been pretty divisive. A review from Ben, my co-editor, is forthcoming, and while I enjoyed the film, he actually almost walked out. So we’ll get to that in a few days.